Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A lively audience Q&A dominates the second half of this 45-minute session, with Geshe Pema Tsering first completing his survey of the ten non-virtues before fielding sharp questions on karma, free will, and the end of the world. He covers the four non-virtues of speech — lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle talk — and the three non-virtues of mind: covetousness, maliciousness, and wrong view. The Q&A opens with whether reincarnation continues if Earth is destroyed (yes — countless other realms exist), then moves to a nuanced exchange on free will: the person being harmed has no free will over that experience, while the one doing harm freely chooses a negative action. He closes by explaining placement and analytical meditation as tools for discerning positive from negative action. Accessible to newcomers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 4NT 2003 06 23.mp3
UUID: c8f293a4-fad2-456c-8367-112cf3d3e3bf
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: DB The four noble truths (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2003-06-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~3,335
For example, using lies to deceive people and to try and hurt them, or using lies to try and confuse people about Dharma, there’s no like, for example, saying there won’t be any results to your actions, no consequences to your actions, or saying that you have realizations of some kind when you don’t, are considered to be the harshest lies and the lies with the harshest results. So so if we’re just joking around and say something is when it isn’t to tease someone, it does have a result, but it’s very slight. So the definition of a lie is when you confuse someone, when you try and get them to think something that isn’t or think something something that isn’t or something that isn’t is. So so if you say to someone, oh, there’s something outside, and they go and look and you go, no. There isn’t.
It may just be a joke. But as soon you’ve thought, I I wanna confuse them, then then that’s what the definition of a lie is. Okay. So anytime that we experience confusion or don’t understand something at the now, that’s the result of having lied in the past in some way or another. Geshe says he must have done a lot of lying because he gets confused a lot.
The next one is, translated as slander or divisive speech. Basically, what it entails is that if two people are close or they’re friendly towards each other, and you go to one and say something about the other and then the other and say something about the first one with the intention of trying to make them not friendly or to have antagonistic feelings towards each other then that thought and the actual speaking to them is what’s called divisive speech or slander. If you think of something that doesn’t necessarily it may be true, it may not be true but by saying it to someone you’re going to cause them not to be friendly to someone that they are being friendly to, then that’s called divisive speech. So a result of having slandered people and use divisive speech in the past could be that we don’t get things that we want coming towards us. We may desire something and we don’t get it or we think if something happens, it’ll make us happy, it doesn’t happen.
Because we’ve done things to make other people sad in the in the past, then we have to experience the results of that now. Harsh speech. Now what harsh speech means is anything that we say with the intention of trying to harm somebody else. So sometimes we can use really good words to try and harm someone else. Sometimes we can use really rough or crass words to try and harm someone else.
But if the intention is that by saying them or by yelling at them that we are going to harm them in some way, then that’s considered harsh speech. Speaking nonsense is anytime we speak without any specific purpose. If there’s no reason for us to speak, can we just talk? Or if we So if we talk, we make meaningless conversation about what may or may not happen in the future, even though we have no reason to believe it may or may not happen, or what may or may not happen in the recent past, or what may or may not So those four are considered the four non virtues of speech. Because they’re all related to our speech, then they’re all put together.
So any non virtues that we do through what’s called the door of our speech is one of these four different types. So the three non virtues of mind are covetousness or wanting what we don’t have, maliciousness, and a wrong view. First one, covetousness, is basically when we see something that we don’t have and think, oh, I really want that’, whether it’s something somebody else owns or something that we see in a shop. In fact, going into shops can be a good opportunity for us to have lots of this type of sorts. That’s all called like covetousness or this grasping mind.
This is something that we do quite often. See a car we want, we see a house we want, we see clothes we want, we see a partner we want. We have this idea in our head a fair bit. So the second non virtue of mind is what’s called maliciousness. Maliciousness is a type of thought that we have where we want to harm somebody else.
We either want to harm them for no reason, we want to harm them because they harmed us, or we want to harm them because by harming them we will get something else from it. So any of these types of thoughts are what’s called maliciousness. Those types of thoughts, anytime we have them, then that creates a negative karma for us that we’ll have to experience the results of. So this is something that we need to stop doing is to stop thinking malicious thoughts. So the the last one, wrong views, is any ideas that we have that things that we don’t see don’t necessarily exist.
For example, if we think one is called the Three Jewels or the Buddha, Dharma and the Sangha that they don’t exist because we don’t see them, or that past and future lives don’t exist because we don’t see them, or anything else that we can’t see by saying that they don’t exist, and then that’s considered a wrong view. So that’s the last of the non virtues of mind. So these are what’s called the ten non virtues. They’re the things that, especially at the beginning, we have to get rid of, abandon doing. The opposite of those, the ten virtues, is stopping from doing those things.
When we stop doing those things, at the same time we’re practising the ten virtues So especially when we start trying to do Buddhist practice or religious practice these are the things that we need to try and practice yeah. That’s. Sorry. So if anyone has questions. Yeah.
Okay. So what happens to theory of reincarnation if the world gets wiped out? Yeah? He said, you don’t have to worry. You still have to be reborn because from the Buddhist perspective, this is not the only world in existence.
Just getting rid of earth wouldn’t get rid of all the suffering, otherwise they would have done it before. The Buddhists would have done it before. So there’s all these other existences where people are reborn into. Whether it’s different realities or different worlds or different dimensions, there’s always different places for people So Geshe-la said that if we’re thinking about the place where everybody’s born, then the earth would only be like the thumb compared to all the different things. Somebody must say all that.
It’s it’s not even very special, and it’s pretty small and insignificant. Yeah. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah.
So who you talk whose free will are you talking about? The person in the or the? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So that’s two different things. Yeah. You’re talking about the free will of the the the person doing the harming and the free will of the person receiving the harming. Okay.
So according to the Buddha’s point of view, anybody who experiences any kind of suffering or any type of harm directed towards them is experiencing the result of their previous negative actions. So if someone hurts you and you experience the pain, it’s because you did something negative in the past and you were experiencing the results of that karma. The person experiencing it is experiencing the results of their karma and doesn’t have any free will over that. Next bit was the person doing that actually doing the action of harming someone else they have free will. They have chosen to do something negative when they could have chosen to do something positive.
The person that is the actual actor in this case had the choice to either harm or not to harm and they chose to harm. Therefore, they had free will in that instance and they will experience the results of that negativity. We have free will in a way because we have the choice of either considering ourselves to be incredibly important and working for only our own benefit and not considering others, or we have the choice to work for others. That’s the way our free will works. We can choose to work for ourselves and not consider others and then experience the negative results of that, or we can choose to work for others and experience positive results.
So we have free will in order before we do any action, we have free will. Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
What plan? Sorry. I didn’t know who got it. Is it like, you’re talking about a big plan of the way things work, or is it Definitely not. I work for three.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Right. But then okay.
So it’s something that you need to be ask asking then. I’m I’m trying to get a question out here, though. Is there a plan in Buddhism? Because you’re suggesting that there is. Okay.
But but I think okay. But there’s two things that I think that that which is making it almost impossible for me to translate. Right? There’s two things you’re assuming. Yeah?
That there is a plan. Yeah? And that there’s there’s things that are meant to be, and there’s things that are not meant to be. Right? So it so I can ask Geshe-la, are there things that are meant to be and things not meant to be?
And is there is there a plan? But Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. So the way that I was saying it, he was just going, what are you talking about?
Yes. I didn’t grow up speaking Tibetan. So the first thing he said that often when people harm us, we think that the person is as the actual agent for us harming us, for us experiencing harm. The only way that we can ever experience harm is by doing something negative, right, and then experiencing its results. So when someone harms us, we think they’re harming me, but in actual fact, it’s our negative actions.
It’s us experiencing the result of our negative actions that we did in the past. So the way that karma works according to the Buddhist perspective is thoroughly. Everything is karma. Every action. karma literally as soon as karma translated is action.
So every action and every result is karma. Yeah. So there is no exception to that from the Buddhist perspective. Everything is karma. So and this and the and the thing that’s actually hurting us when we get hurt, and the the reason that we’re getting hurt isn’t the person that’s hurting us, but our negative actions that have caused us to experience that result.
So the other thing about karma that we don’t understand is is how subtle it is because it’s every single action that we’ve ever done and ever experienced, yeah, then it’s an incredibly subtle thing. The only people that according to Buddhist perspective, the only people that understand karma properly are Buddhas. So a Buddha can, for example, look at a rainbow and say, Okay, the yellow is there because of this, the red is there because of that, the green is there because of that. And they understand karma that subtly. But for us, we don’t see it that way.
We only see the gross manifestations of karma. But there is not a single phenomenon in the world or in existence according to the Buddhist philosophy that isn’t because of karma. So everything, every experience we have is is karma. So if George Bush decided to do that, that would be our karma. Yeah.
That would be the result of our karma. The problem with us thinking that that’s surprising is that we consider ourselves to be incredibly important. For example, little bugs living in the ground. Thousands of little bugs can be squished by one car. You can do if you pull one bug out, that bug would probably think that it was incredibly important.
And that the one bug can be squished by all these cars. So this is same with us. We think that we’re important so that these sort of things can’t happen. But because we have karma and delusion, they can. Even the fact that George Bush these days has the power to press a few buttons and wipe us all out, the fact that he’s the president of the United States, that he has all this power, that everybody knows who he is, that he has in he has all his wealth and attention.
Yeah? That’s because of calm. So he must have done something incredibly strongly positive in order to get that as a result. Yep. Hang on.
Hang on. Hang on, mate. So in so all of us, I guess, have done things positive for us to reach the state Uh-huh. Of human beings. I guess, George Bush, you’ve done lots of positive things, but he forgets every life.
Yeah. He keeps doing positive things. But, also, he changes. Uh-huh. He does nothing wrong.
But what what I mean is me and the young lady next next to me, we’ve done good things, and we’ve reached our stage with humanity, And here we are in this lovely place. Yeah. And I decided to really do harm her Yeah. On the way out of here. Oh, everybody else.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’ll just keep keep it leave it to her for the moment. Yeah.
She she obviously deserves it. Deserves it? Yeah. That’s a weird that’s a weird word. Oh, it might be weird, but it’s it’s it’s her karma.
That’s her karma. That’s different. Okay. It’s her karma. Yeah.
So I’ve done something good, really. It’s by giving her a just deserts. Gosh. Uh-huh. She’s got a mission of Yeah.
Bad positive. Yeah. Right. Okay. So anytime you do negative negativities towards anyone else, anytime you harm anyone else, that’s a negative action.
But if I don’t do it, then you’re gonna get away for free. But someone else not as in life. But that that person then is doing the dirty work. Someone’s gotta go do the dirty work. Okay.
It doesn’t work that way. It’s not up to you to decide what other people’s karma is. You have to work on your own actions. If you do something positive, you will experience your results. If you do something negative, then you will experience the negative results of that action.
So it depends on each individual. You don’t get to say what other people’s karma is. Okay. Which a simple thing. You mentioned earlier that only the Buddhas know that what’s real, shade of yellow.
That’s what they know then they know why. Yeah. That’s calming. So it follows that none of us here can really know what’s positive action and what’s a negative action. Uh-huh.
So we can’t really choose Okay. Okay. So it works two ways. First of all, Buddha, who is supposed to know all different karma, all the results of different karma, said that these ten things are nonvirtuous, and you will experience negative results as their result. The positive things that are their substitute will make you experience positivity at this result.
You’ll experience good things. Buddha also said not to just rely on what he said. He said to go out and try it out. He said to try and experience these things. So he said to try and see that if you do positivity, will it result in positive things?
If you do negative things, does it result in negative things? So so, yeah, the stakes are high. You can really hurt people, and you can really experience the results of your sufferings because of doing that. So we do have to be very aware of the way we think and the way that we are. Because the other thing the Buddha said was it wasn’t up to him.
It’s up to us. It’s up to us whether we do positive things or negative things, and it’s up to us the results that we’ll get from those positive and negative things. It’s not about negative things. The Buddha said that you have to he said it’s not just about me telling you what to do. Right?
So you have the ability to figure this out yourself. I used to have he used to the Buddha used to be just the same as us. So we have the ability to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong for ourselves. So the Buddha said, from my experience, this is what I know to be right and wrong. Yeah?
So this is what I’m saying now. Go and see if that makes sense to you. Yeah. Well, look at it for yourself. And if it makes sense for you, then do it.
You may forget everything that you know, but the the imprints or the tendencies in your mind stream will continue afterwards. Okay. So that was will we progress forward, is it possible to turn into an animal again? So that depends on what we do now. If we do positive things now and we try and think about other people and try and be compassionate and then we will receive we will sorry not receive we will get a good rebirth we will achieve a good rebirth in the next life if we do negative things and create a lot of negativities and have very negative type of mind, then we will go down to the animal realms or the ghost realms or the hell realms.
So likewise, we’re now we have got the the body of a human human existence here, and they say that the human existence and the god existence are the existences of happiness. So in the god existence and the human existence, any happiness we experience, any comfort we experience is because of positive things we did in the past. And likewise, if we see animals that are suffering or if we see if we know of spirits or people think of hit people in the hell realms that are suffering then they are suffering because of the negativities they did in the past so if we want to continue as a human then we need to continue doing positive things. Hang on. The lady at the back was first.
Yeah? Uh-huh. Guest, that’s all. And you may okay. So does meditation help us to see right and wrong?
Is that basically? I guess so. I mean, know, that’s me. That’s been the way I’ve been able Yeah. Okay.
Okay. So in Buddhism, meditation is considered incredibly important. There’s two different types of meditation. They say there’s placement meditation and analytical meditation. Placement meditation is when you concentrate single pointedly on one thing, and analytical meditation is where you analyze something, go through an analytical process in your head.
And both types of meditation is just incredibly important. So if you do meditation, especially analytical meditation, then you should be able to see the benefits of abandoning the ten non virtues and the positive results from practising the ten virtues. If you analyse those in a meditative process, then you’d be able to see the positive and the negative there. First of he said he didn’t think that it was possible to do that. And then and I said that if you get rid of all the rubbish from your mind, then you can find the answer.
He said if you knew the answer before you went in there you just couldn’t see it because your mind was confused.